Archie Horror: Post Five: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

First and foremost, it is important to view Archie Horror as an imprint, like Wildstorm or Vertigo, rather than a shared universe like Marvel. Although the different titles begin with characters from Archie Comics, they are not meant to be the same characters across all titles. The Sabrina in Afterlife with Archie (AwA) is clearly a different Sabrina than the one in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (CAoS). Part of how this is shown currently is by having different artists for each title, so while AwA has the Francavilla style, CAoS is given a far different look by Robert Hack.

The first issue follows Sabrina through her childhood and ends up being set in the mid 60s, so we're immediately in a really interesting and specific time period. The witches in the series are definitely the Horror genre standards, worshiping the devil and pledging him their souls (sorry fans of Hilda and Zelda, but these aunts are pretty terrifying). Sabrina is a half witch, half human and the first arc (titled The Crucible) follows her in the last few days before her sixteenth birthday when she's set to devote her life to darkness as her aunts have.

The series has a really great feel to it, and also includes shout outs to a number of horror films and books with similar themes, like Rosemary's Baby and others.

It is fair to say that this title, as with AwA is definitely not for children - there are incidents of extreme violence and not all of your favourite characters necessarily make it through each issue, but the narrative is really intriguing and I'm really interested to see how much of the source material will be making it into the Netflix adaptation later this week.

Things I've Noticed: Theme Months can be fun!

Having just spent a month focusing entirely on one topic, Hack/Slash by Tim Seeley, I'm back to do the regular bloggity-blog stuff now!

In some ways I view my theme months as vacations - even through I spent a lot of time focussed entirely on one topic, whether a comic, a YA vampire series, or a style of movie, what I also do is build up a backlog of posts to write in November.

Last month I saw more than a few great Horror movies I hadn't seen before, read the new Stephen King novel Doctor Sleep, and finished the PS3 Game The Last of Us.

So now, even though I've still going to have to write each of these posts, I've now got a whole bunch of raw material in my reserves, and all because I've spent my last month focusing elsewhere.

Which is pretty great.

So there you go - if you haven't tried a theme-month for your blog, it has all sorts of bonuses.

Things I’ve Noticed: I won Bookmonkey Saw!

So I just got my mark back for my class project focusing on the Saw franchise and I got 87% - my conclusion wasn’t as strong as it could be, but my review of the videogame stood out nicely and overall I’m pretty proud of my work.

 

Next year I’m not sure which aspect of horror I’ll be looking into – perhaps a style of horror like “found footage”, exorcisms or zombies,  or maybe I’ll spend more time looking into a format, like horror in videogames or the like.

 

Anyway, it was a lot of work, it’s something I’m glad to say I’ve finished and I’m quite happy to finally put the Saw franchise behind me.

 

Thanks everyone!

Thing's I've Noticed: Growing a "Saw" collection can be pricey

One of the things people don't often realize about having a "Theme" month, is that it can get kinda pricey.

Back in 2010 when I did Twilight of Bookmonkey, the price was fairly minimal - my kids owned all the Twilight books, as well as the first two films, so all I needed to find was the novella and some soundtracks, which was fairly easy as my local library had everything.

In 2011 for The Reimagining of Bookmonkey, things got a little pricier - the library doesn't tend to collect horror movies so over the course of a few used book store runs I had to trade away movies I was finished with for a lot of movies that I would soon be finished with  - quick note here, if everything you are looking for is available in multiple copies at multiple used-bookstores, maybe the thing you're looking for isn't that great.

This year, I've got seven films, two PS3 games, a couple seasons of a reality TV show and a single issue of a comic book from 2004 to track down.

So far I've laid out about $30, making Bookmonkey Saw my priciest theme-month to date.  Also that was for one game, a specific edition of the first film (which included the 2003 short film used to sell the script to potential buyers) and the comic.

Thank god I can rent the rest.

Anyway - I'm not complaining too much, after all I do get to spend the next month watching all these movies, and seriously, how bad could they be?